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Watch carefully and you can see the Republican party forming a circular firing squad. The trigger was last weekend’s much delayed vote for $61bn in Ukraine aid. Republicans were divided almost evenly. The difference between a yes and a no vote on Ukraine was far bigger than Ukraine; it represents irreconcilable world views. Not even Donald Trump, who is sitting distractedly, day after day, in a dingy New York courtroom, can bridge the gulf between globalist and anti-globalist Republicans.
They talk about each other as the enemy. “It’s my absolute honour to be in Congress, but I serve with some real scumbags,” said Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, before referring to his “neo-Nazi” primary challenger who is being backed by some of his House colleagues. “These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime.” Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, is only slightly less blunt: “So much of the hesitation and short-sightedness that has delayed this moment is premised on sheer fiction,” he said of the Ukraine funding.
The latest, and most significant, Republican breach was brought about by an unexpected display of guts. The House Speaker and diehard evangelist, Mike Johnson, had a road-to-Damascus moment when US intelligence briefers laid out Ukraine’s dire fate to him if the House failed to deliver. Ukraine’s improbable saviour remains a 2020 election denier. Another routine conspiracist, Newt Gingrich — who was one of Johnson’s predecessors as Speaker in the 1990s — urged him to support Ukraine and damn the consequences. “Brave men die but once,” Gingrich said. “A coward dies a hundred deaths.”
Johnson took those words to heart. The price may be a challenge to his speakership when the House returns next week. Still more enraging to Johnson’s critics is that his change of heart was prompted by a deep state briefing. It is an article of faith among Trumpians that the CIA, the FBI and the departments of justice and homeland security are sources of globalist propaganda. That makes Johnson a traitor not just to their main foreign policy cause that Ukraine must submit to Russia; his move also rebuked their narrative about Washington. If Johnson can believe the CIA on Ukraine, might he also take other national security briefings to heart?
Yet the vote was only a weak guide to future behaviour. Trump seems to have allowed it to happen in a fit of absent-mindedness. He had spent the previous four days struggling to keep his eyes open while lawyers wrangled over jury selection for his hush money criminal trial. Some of Trump’s fatigue doubtless stemmed from his night-time social media activity, which includes alleged violations of the judge’s gag order. The fact that Trump is banned from using his smartphone in court, and has more than once been told to sit down, cannot be helpful to his energy. He has another six weeks to endure. No family member has yet joined him in court. Melania Trump, the former, and possible future, first lady, is unlikely to go near a scene in which Stormy Daniels, the porn star who allegedly slept with her husband (something Trump denies), is due to take the stand.
Regardless of the trial’s outcome and its effect on public opinion, Trump will return with a vengeance when it is over. But a spell was broken in the House last Saturday. For the polite fiction of classifying some of the aid as a loan, Trump gave Joe Biden and Ukraine — the two names that span his impeachments and election defeat — a timely reprieve. The House also passed a bill authorising Biden to seize $6bn of Russia’s frozen reserves for Ukraine. Most of the rest of Russia’s $300bn in foreign assets is in Europe. The Kremlin was not happy. “We had fully expected this,” said Vladimir Putin’s poker-faced spokesman. Putin’s predecessor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, called for a new US civil war that would “lead to the inglorious break-up of the 21st century’s evil empire”.
Much more likely is that Republicans will degenerate into their own civil war. Almost half the party — 101 voted yes, 112 voted no — are now wedded to positions far beyond the Ukrainian battlefield. Trump, in his acquiescence, is also now strangely linked to these stances. The idea that Biden conspired with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to harm Trump’s 2020 election prospects is now accepted as nonsensical. So, too, is the notion that Putin poses an exaggerated risk, or is in fact a friend. If Ukraine was worth another $61bn, how could it possibly be a threat to US democracy? Perhaps the courtroom so shrunk Trump’s field of vision that he failed to apprehend what he had agreed to outside it.